Article Syndication

[DHS_SH]

I have been approached by a website (domain authority 65, homepage authority 70, linking domains 415) that syndicates other website's content.

They are keen to promote one of my existing articles on their website and are in a similar subject niche .

My immediate reaction was "No", as I am keen to avoid any negative impact on our SEO-efforts that may be created through having my content duplicated on another website.

I am just looking from the feedback from the rest of the community as to what their thoughts are - does the potential benefit of driving visitors from a popular website outweigh the fact that our own article may not rank very well organically as it has been duplicated.

I think the fact that we have been approached regarding the syndication suggests that the website in question is not a spammy "scraper" website that activity looks to employ black hat techniques, but I don't want to risk effecting my organic SERP ranking.

Thoughts?

[EGOL]

Have you read this?

http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/yes-high-quality-guest-posts-can-get-you-penalized/

I agree with the author, Marie Haynes, that you can get in trouble through guest posting.

One topic that she did not cover in this article (because it focused on the Penguin problems), is that giving guest posts to other websites that are relevant to the content of your website is that it feeds your competitors and creates new ones.

I will say that a lot of people disagree with my ideas about guest posting.  I think that they view it as a necessary way to gain links.  I think that it is like gladly allowing someone to take over your business because you think it will bring a little traffic to your website.

[DHS_SH]

That's a No then?

[EGOL]

Sure, then I will not have to hire a freelancer to find them.

[DHS_SH]

Ok great, sounds like we all seem to agree on the fact that syndicating content is not a great idea.

Away from this, is the idea of writing a guest post for them (1 that is clearly introduced as from ourselves) a bad one? Surely this would be a good opportunity to build some links to my website and (being a popular website) drive some traffic as part of the same process.

[EGOL]

What a great idea!

I should start contacting all of my weak competitors and ask for permission to republish all of their best articles.  The benefits to me would be huge.  My site would probably outrank theirs in the SERPs, I will get links, likes, tweets and mentions from their hard work, they will probably get the duplicate content problem instead of me, and they will think that I am a great guy for offering to promote their content and place a link at the bottom of the page that almost nobody will click.

This is such a great idea that I should hire a whole team of freelancers to contact all of my competitors, in all of my niches, get all of their best content and post it onto my sites.

What would my answer be if someone called me up or emailed to ask for some of my content.

NO!   (answer here much more polite than reality)

[AlanMosley]

Maybe, but I would put that one on your site also. The page will probably end up so deep in the site that the links would carry very little link juice, there will probably be so many links on the page linking back to their own site that very little would be shared with your links.

On the other hand, adding a page to your site will boost page rank just by existing  and with smart linking will increase your homepage rank for ever. See http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

[DHS_SH]

Thanks Alan - I was thinking it would be a better solution to propose that a unique article is written by us for them to use on their website (with deep links pointing back at my website).

What do you think?

[AlanMosley]

I think you are right in the first place.

If the article is a good one that they would like want it on their site, then I think you should keep it on yours. The amount of traffic you will get from a article buried somewhere on such a site would be very limited if any IMO.